Exhibit illustrates artist’s unique growth in universal way

Once upon a time there was a tree. She wasn't the tallest or the most beautiful tree in the forest, but she had gained some wisdom in her years and had very much enjoyed her tree-existence.

This is how artist Valerie Wedel, a curator and adjunct professor at Missouri Valley College, begins the narrative of her current installation at Orr Street Studios. The exhibit incorporates written and visual narratives, which relate to the artist's recent experience with hypothyroidism and the impact of illness on her life. The narratives are interwoven, with enough space in the story and images for an audience to relate and impose imagination.

Many of the images, which the artist created from a brown hue of cut paper and placed directly on the gallery wall, are non-objective enough to function like Rorschach test images. You can look at them and allow your mind to shape them into objects that have meaning to you, and in that way, the narrative of the work becomes personal. The style and approach represent a break with the artist's past work, which was primarily performance- and video-based.

"Words have always been a part of what I've seen of hers," friend Janet Berry said, "but most of the time you could never make a narrative. There was no narrative, or if there was, the viewer couldn't perceive the narrative. … Another thing that has always been part of her work is this interactive aspect, and that's very much what she's looking for."

Wedel had a book in mind while working on the primarily two-dimensional piece, she said, and would like to publish the story and images in some form in the future. In the gallery, the story flows organically from one text bubble to the next through the imagery, and guides the viewer around the space.

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She delighted in the birds and squirrels who would chatter among her branches and experienced the loss of fall leaves and the subsequent spring re-growth with grace. She produced nuts with a unique flavor, which the birds and squirrels found tasty. Being tuned in to her own nature as a tree, she upheld her treeness quite well.

For most of her life, the artist has enjoyed good health and hasn't experienced many disruptive events. But last fall, she began to feel exhausted all the time, even after 12 hours of sleep. She began forgetting things — students' names, for example, which she prided herself on remembering, along with details about their lives. To fulfill the simplest requirements of her life, "I had to try really hard," she said, "and the harder I tried — it was just kind of like spinning wheels. I kept working harder, and that made me sicker."

The tree cannot pinpoint exactly when it started, but one day she found she was working much harder than before to maintain herself. She still produced her nuts and leaves — in fact, a bit more than usual. But she found she had no energy left to enjoy the birds' songs and had forgotten the names of most of the squirrels.

Wedel felt "like I was presenting a paper cutout of myself to the world," she said, but working in cut paper wasn't a conscious analogy until after the show was hung. After being diagnosed and given the appropriate medication, Wedel began to recover her strength and energy but felt she had learned some lessons about life. She realized life did not have to look like the conventional conception we hold in our culture.

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Winter came, which was a relief, as it meant the tree got a break. "By the time spring rolls around, I'll be well-rested and back to normal," she thought and sat back, relishing the magnificent snow formations on her branches.

She began to slow down and notice small things and appreciate the facets of her life that she was too busy to enjoy before. Instead of focusing primarily on furthering her career, "I realized the other things in my life take more time than I was devoting to them," she said. "Having a decent relationship with your family members, taking care of your living space, taking care of your body and just allowing for those moments of serendipity to happen during the day — discovering things or interacting with people — they take a lot of time."

Although Wedel hadn't experienced much in the way of disruptive events in her own life, she is no stranger to their existence and has reached out to help others. Wedel showed up to assist and read to former University of Missouri Art Department Chair William Berry, who was ailing before his death several years ago, related his wife. "And she's been helping me catalogue all of his work, which is more than 7,000 pieces," Janet Berry continued.

Because these changes forced Wedel to step back and slow down and rethink her life, she realized at one point that she felt analogous to a seed. In the installation's narrative, this transformation from tree to seed is an impossible mystery.

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With great concentrated effort, she also realized that she no longer had any branches, leaf buds, stems or bark. Without knowing her form and therefore not knowing her part in the theatre of life, she did not know how to act. Days passed and nothing happened. Nothing. What an odd experience for a full-grown tree. Strangely, she felt fine and often quite happy despite her 180 degree turn, just curious as to what she really was. In the meantime, she had lots of opportunity to dream …

Eventually, a revelation came to her— "I'm a seed! I've turned back into a seed!"

Working backwards from the idea that she had transformed from tree to seed, Wedel thought about the ways in which her life had been analogous to that of a tree, before her personal paradigm shift.

"Most of my life I've been moving a lot more than a tree does, but to me, the seed and the tree are sort of the same being," she said. "The tree turned into a seed. It didn't produce a seed. It became a seed."

Starting with small pieces of paper, which she cut without intention — she called it "doodling with scissors" — Wedel then projected the shapes onto a wall to make templates for the larger pieces. She noted that she was inspired by the narrative friezes on Greek vases. The tree and the seed are the clearest visual representations in the piece, aside from the sun — which was created in a blue shade of paper rather than the brown of the rest of the installation. A person establishes roots, has a core of growth in a particular direction and branches out in many directions.

"The tree represents a being that's had experiences and has gone through life and developed themselves to a certain point," Wedel said.

The rest of the images are more non-objective, more open to interpretation. No matter who looks at the work, the tree turns into a seed. But how and why it gets there are up to each individual viewer, and that's the value of the installation.

"It is about process, … the process of going through it," Berry remarked. "It's a personal journey, but it has a universal appeal."

This article was published in the Sunday, July 28, 2013 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Going to seed: Exhibit illustrates artist’s unique growth in universal way."